My next responsibility is to start the next revision (draft 7) as soon as possible.
But before I do that, I’m taking just a few days off… from revising. Not from creating things.
Those of you who were around the blog in January might remember Basil, the common house zebra. Well, after I created Basil, a request came in for Sock Sunny and Sock Tanker.
This is real-life Sunny.
This is real-life Tanker.
Sunny the dog and Tanker the cat live in Florida with two seven-year-olds. Sunny LOVES Tanker. Tanker’s feelings for Sunny are more complicated, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that months and months after acquiring the appropriate socks, I FINALLY got to work.
I started with Sock Sunny, because a sock dog requires less altering of a sock zebra pattern than a sock cat does. Socks animals made from this pattern generally turn into long-faced, thin animals, not wonderfully roly-poly cats with round heads. I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do when it came time to make Sock Tanker, to be honest.
Anyway, I began cutting, sewing, and stuffing, modifying the pattern somewhat to give Sock Sunny a face that was less long and shaped a bit more like Sunny’s actual face.
Real-life Sunny is an Australian cattle dog, which means he has a half-“mask” over one side of his face that I knew was going to be impossible to find in a pair of socks. But I was able to find some socks that reproduce some of his speckles.
Real-life Sunny has big ears, a brown nose, an anxious expression (“Am I a good dog? Am I a good dog?”), a long tail, and an extremely sweet disposition. I hid a little heart under his big head.
Because of his long tail and the thickness of his fabric, Sock Sunny has a power Basil Zebra doesn’t: he can sit up on his own.
Here he is hanging out with his brother Basil.
Then it was time to get started on Tanker. The solution I came up with for the pattern problem was to choose a short and extremely stretchy pair of socks that adjusted well to lots of stuffing.
You can’t see it in the picture I shared, but real-life Tanker has enormous blue eyes.
Real-life Tanker’s breed is called Stumpy Manx, which means that he doesn’t really have a tail, he has more of a stump. This was lucky for me, because I made Sock Tanker out of a pretty small pair of socks, and I wouldn’t have had enough sock left to make him a long tail…
He is softer and more fuzzy than it looks in the pictures.
So here they are! Soon I will be packing them away for their journey south.
By the time they get to their new home, I will be well into my next revision.
